{"id":1553,"date":"2015-02-22T10:20:29","date_gmt":"2015-02-22T16:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/?p=1553"},"modified":"2015-11-06T11:30:10","modified_gmt":"2015-11-06T17:30:10","slug":"walden-or-walled-in-tzatziki-soup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/?p=1553","title":{"rendered":"Walden or Walled In? Tzatziki Soup"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0;float:none\"><iframe src=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/plugins\/like.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fthesoupblog.com%2F%3Fp%3D1553&amp;layout=button_count&amp;show_faces=true&amp;action=like&amp;font=arial&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;width=450&amp;height=30\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" allowTransparency=\"true\" style=\"border:none; overflow:hidden; width: 450px; height: 30px;\"><\/iframe><\/div><div id=\"attachment_1557\" style=\"width: 426px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-1557\" href=\"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/?attachment_id=1557\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1557\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1557 \" title=\"walden-pond\" src=\"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/walden-pond1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"416\" height=\"275\" srcset=\"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/walden-pond1.jpg 520w, https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/walden-pond1-100x66.jpg 100w, https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/walden-pond1-300x198.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 416px) 100vw, 416px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1557\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Walden Pond: Inspiring lives of quiet respiration since 1845<\/p><\/div>\n<p>After my trials and tribulations with cucumber soup this week, going to see an author reading about Thoreau seemed somehow inappropriate. The most recent blog deadline had already rushed past and the desperation that filled my life was anything but quiet.<\/p>\n<p>I railed and\u00a0 railed.<\/p>\n<p>What was I writing this stupid blog for anyway? Didn\u2019t I already have enough pressures in my life? Wasn\u2019t it time at last to quit nattering and move on?<\/p>\n<p>(sigh)<\/p>\n<p>The weather wasn\u2019t cooperating either.<\/p>\n<p>As the mercury reached into the high 90\u2019s, the warmth sapped the energy right out of me. At least I didn\u2019t suffer from heat stroke like our poor guinea pigs. But the conditions were hardly ideal for soup-making.<\/p>\n<p>Yet there the cucumbers sat on my counter reminding me of my weekly duty to the Internet. I patiently peeled each cuke and scraped out their seeds until they looked like the sort of dugout canoes Thoreau himself might have used.<\/p>\n<p>Then I chopped them up, threw them in a pot with all manner of other ingredients\u2014onions, mint, lemon juice, milk, apples, okra! The soup that came out of all this was practically a sin against nature. And for me that\u2019s bad, really bad.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve had a reverence for the wild as long as I can remember. Whether I\u2019m in the forest, the desert, the mountains, even the prairie, I always feel myself stirring back to life as my ego dissolves into the wilderness. However, this doesn\u2019t square with my memories of Thoreau.<\/p>\n<p>My recollections about <em>Walden<\/em> center on the writer\u2019s obsession with the price of the beans he grew, his detailed listing of the yield of each of his various crops, how much they cost and what they sold for. I know I\u2019m probably missing the forest for the trees in my understanding of Thoreau, but that\u2019s something I never have a problem with when I\u2019m out in nature myself.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps Thoreau had the same feelings for nature that I do, but it seems like he\u2019d be more at home with a good cost\/benefit analysis and would have been even happier if he\u2019d had access to a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n<p>Still I love Thoreau\u2019s description of men\u2019s lives being filled with \u201cquiet desperation.\u201d That\u2019s exactly where I was once I\u2019d given up on the week\u2019s first attempt at cucumber soup.<\/p>\n<p>Lucky for me, that\u2019s when the weather broke and with it the funk I\u2019d fallen into, or was it more of a hissy fit? As a terrific thunderstorm split the sky, I drove back to the store, got some more cucumbers and started again.<\/p>\n<p>This next version was going to be a cold soup, based on the Greek cucumber and yogurt sauce known as <em>tzatziki<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>If I were Thoreau, I\u2019d probably have made do with the first soup. Rather than obsessing about its awful flavor and texture so much that I flushed the whole thing down the toilet, I would have savored the freshness of the individual ingredients. But then Thoreau was out there all by himself, I\u2019ve got a family to feed. You try telling your kids to ignore the flavor of a dish and focus on the freshness of the ingredients.<\/p>\n<p>We had the second soup for lunch yesterday along with a delicious vegetarian couscous salad. And while I appreciate Thoreau\u2019s vision of making do with less, I went ahead and had a second helping.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Tzatziki Soup<br \/>\n<\/strong>(6-8 servings)<br \/>\n4 medium cucumbers, peeled, seeded and diced<br \/>\n4 cloves garlic, minced<br \/>\n1 qt vegetable stock<br \/>\n4 T white wine vinegar<br \/>\n1 T mint<br \/>\n1 T dill<br \/>\n1 qt vegetable stock<br \/>\n2 cups plain yogurt<br \/>\nSalt &amp; pepper to taste<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Blend the ingredients together      in a 3 quart soup pot then puree with an immersion blender.<\/li>\n<li>Chill in the refrigerator for a      few hours or overnight.<\/li>\n<li>Serve cold.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><em>Image Credit: <\/em>\u201cWalden Pond,\u201d from the Earth First! website.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I\u2019ve never been to Walden pond, but I introduced my kids to Thoreau early, through the book <em>Henry Hikes to Fitchburg<\/em>. If you\u2019d like to get a terrific, more modern take on Thoreau, check out the new book <em><a href=\"http:\/\/tommontgomeryfate.com\/\">Cabin Fever by Tom Montgomery Fate<\/a><\/em>. Read it over a nice bowl of soup.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After my trials and tribulations with cucumber soup this week, going to see an author reading about Thoreau seemed somehow inappropriate. The most recent blog deadline had already rushed past and the desperation that filled my life was anything but quiet. I railed and\u00a0 railed. What was I writing this stupid blog for anyway? Didn\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,48,61,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cucumber","category-dairy","category-garlic","category-vegetarian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1583,"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions\/1583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesoupblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}